KFIA is the largest airport in the world in physical terms, covering a geographical area of approximately 667km². The airport serves all the major cities and industries situated in the Eastern province of the Kingdom.
The General Authority for Civil Aviation (GACA) has taken the decision to modernise the airport’s analogue-based TETRA network to improve public safety as part of a long-term expansion plan to increase the airport’s passenger handling capacity from 5 million to 16 million by 2038.
Zinwave’s in-building wireless technology (the Zinwave DAS 3000) will be installed in the airport’s six-storey passenger terminal, the royal terminal, the public mosque and a multi-storey car park spread over three levels. Its DAS system will also be installed in the airport’s extensive tunnel network to provide reliable TETRA coverage for maintenance, security and safety purposes.
Shortly after the contract was awarded by GACA to Saudi Bell Group, the Saudi Arabian Government authority responsible for frequencies allocation substituted the initially assigned frequency band of 380 – 400 MHz with the 350 – 360MHz, which is considered to be a non-standard TETRA band.
Saudi Bell Group undertook a review of the market and found that Zinwave was the only vendor that could support these frequencies without needing any development work to its overall system.
Zinwave was chosen because it was the only company that was able to immediately supply an integrated solution that was frequency-agnostic. Its in-building wireless technology is truly wideband and is able to support all wireless and cellular frequencies, between 150MHz and 2700 MHz on a single hardware infrastructure.
Zinwave’s system architecture is simple in design and quick to deploy. It comprises a primary hub, which interfaces with the TETRA base station, four secondary hubs, used for the distribution of the deployed services, and 33 remote units which are distributed around the terminals, mosque, car parking area and maintenance tunnels to ensure signals are optimised throughout the airport to facilitate the different services used by safety, and maintenance and airport ground staff.
Says Colin Abrey, President of International Sales, Zinwave; “We are delighted to be involved in this expansion project. We are the only providers of wideband DAS systems in the true sense of the word. Not only can our technology support all TETRA frequencies, it also supports all cellular frequencies, including the emerging LTE, on a single hardware layer. If the General Authority for Civil Aviation decided to add new services, such as commercial cellular ones, they can do using the same hardware, making the system truly future-proof”
It is expected that the installation will be completed and that the new TETRA network will be fully operational by the end of this year.
_________________________________